


The Past, the Present, the Death, and the Devil

by Tolpen



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Childhood, Death, Fire, Inspired by A Christmas Carol, Loneliness, Metaphors, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Suicide Attempt, possible futures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2019-12-19
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:54:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21863305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tolpen/pseuds/Tolpen
Summary: Prompt: The night of June 6, Javert makes his way to the Pont au Change, places his hat on the parapet, and gazes over the water. But before he jumps, he's interrupted by a visitor: the Ghost of Christmas Past, who is soon followed by the Ghosts of Christmases Present and Yet to Come. (Please don't ask me why there are Christmas ghosts in June.)Alternatively titled as: Javert has one heck of a night and death itself gives him a hug because he really, really needs it.
Relationships: Javert & Jean Valjean
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19
Collections: Sewerchat Solstice Exchange 2019





	The Past, the Present, the Death, and the Devil

**Author's Note:**

  * For [birdafterdark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdafterdark/gifts).



> Yes OK, it's been some time since I've seen A Christmas Carol, never actually read it. I've developed a very hateful relationship to it while writing it, but the story has assured me the feeling is mutual.  
> Oh, and I haven't found a beta reader. There are probably typos or mistakes. But hey, a free story.
> 
> Suggested soundtrack: [Carol of the Bells ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GLEJEYDdfg)

“Well, are you going to stand there the whole night?”

Javert turned around slowly as not to lose his footing. Ironic, that was what he was just meaning to do, to plung himself in the dark watery depths, and yet now he is careful.

Behind him is a creature, obviously bored. It is neither man nor a woman nor an animal. In height it is as a child, in colour it is as white as a sheet and translucent, seemingly making it disappear before the naked eye, as if one was watching fresh cobwebs. Most peculiar of all is the apparition's head, for it is fire, yet Javert can clearly distinguish a nose, a pair of eyes, a mouth full of teeth.

“Time is fluid and nonlinear, I know, but you really are taking your time, man,” the creature shrieked at him. When Javert, too baffled to move, did not react, it continued: “It's traditional. You jump and I have to catch you right before you hit the water. Chop chop, I haven't got just you, you know.”

Javert very carefully stepped off the parapet and put his hat back on. “Excuse me,” he did not mean to sound disrespectful, “but who or what are you?”

“I am the Ghost of Christmas Past,” the candle-being flurred around him and took his place on the parapet. Against the dark sky it's head was the only light in all of Paris.

That did not make sense to Javert. “It is June.”

“And your point is?” Apparently, the Ghost of the Christmas Past did not want to hear any reasoning Javert could have offered to it. It extends one of its ghostly hands to the Inspector. “Don't stand there like a pillar of salt. Let us go.”

Hesitantly the man took the hand. As soon as their fingers brushes against each other, the ghost grasped him by the wrist, cold and firm like an iron shackle, and yanked him forward and over the parapet.

It was not a fall, it was a flight. The Inspector did not feel himself heavy, not even in the slightest. On the contrary, there was light-headed dizziness and joy from the movement as the strange ghost pulled him forward. They flew up against the current of the river. To the west the sun began rising, the dawn was the dusk at the same time. With their speed they soon left Paris behind and reached a different city.

“Where are we?” Javert asked.

“You tell me where it is we have come to be.”

Javert looked around. The cold sleet rain, the hunched buildings with small barred windows just under the flat roofs, the raging sea behind their backs. He thought he had forgotten. He thought he could forget. “Toulon bagne,” he whispered, “the woman quarters.”

He could hear someone singing. The ghost let its grasp on him loosen and disappear, and Javert felt his weight returning. Yet as he crossed the courtyard he left no footprints behind.

The windows were high up under the roof, but the Inspector was a man of tall figure. Pulling himself up onto his toes he could easily peer into the cell from which he heard a woman singing. He knew the voice and recognized the woman when he saw her, albeit in his memory she was much taller and less dishevelled. Man can never forget his own mother, although God was Javert's witness that he had tried.

She was holding a child in her arms, raven-haired as she was, scrawny and shaking from cold. It couldn't be older than two summers. Now she kissed the little boy's cheek, and Javert could feel the ghost of it upon his own face.

“Why are you crying?” the Ghost of the Christmas Past demanded to know like an impatient kid. “Why are you crying? It's Christmas, the time of joy!”

“If you are jesting,” Javert turned to the ghost and gazed into the depth of its fire, “then your sense of humour is the most cruel I have ever come to know. Take me away from this place, ghost.”

“In such a hurry you are, yet there is so much to see here in this place. Come, come!” And again it took him by wrist, its hand hot as a branding iron, and they flew away from Toulon as around them the days galloped by, whether back or forward Javert cannot say, so great was the speed.

When they reach the land, it is already dark and they are in woods, but the Inspector did not know where and he does not ask the Ghost of Christmas Past where it had taken him. He noticed a movement in the darkness and heard a splash of water.

“Go,” the ghost ordered him.

And thus Javert went. His footsteps were unheard on the fallen snow, and his figure unseen among the dark trees. He found that which had caught his attention soon enough: It was a girl with a bucket of water too heavy for her to carry. Yet she carried it, her frail little body bent sideways as she had to be the counterweight to the heavy pail. Every few steps she had to put it down lest her arms would snap under the terrible wight.

With two decisive steps Javert put himself in her way. But the girl did not notice him, did not see him, and when he did not move from the narrow forest path, she walked right through him as if he hadn't been more than fog. Right after that the girl again put the wooden pail down and panted for breath.

The Inspector turned around only to see a large figure of a man to take hold of the heavy burden. His brow furrowed when he recognized the silhouette. A whisper escaped him, filled with the anger of a disturbed grave as it was heavy with confusion: “Valjean?”

And it indeed was Jean Valjean, several years younger than the couple of hours ago when Javert had sat next to him in the chariot. Javert hurried to look the saint convict in face, although where he had found the courage he did not know. Perhaps it was fuelled by the knowledge that he actually was not here and the two people could not see him.

He followed them out of the wood, no longer thinking about the strange ghost, and into an inn. There he saw Jondrette and his wife and daughters, the whole night guests were walking through him and the whole time he watched Valjean watching the scrawny little girl who had been worked in the inn to the bone and the bone then to marrow until Valjean stepped in. He saw Valjean leaving and returning with a large and obviously expensive doll which was then given to the girl who was too enchanted by all that had happened to actually play with it. He saw Valjean sneaking a gold coin to the girl's shoes when everyone had gone to sleep.

And then he saw himself in the reflection of a window and behind his shoulder the last flickering of fire in the hearth. When he turned around, the Ghost of the Christmas Past was sitting there.

“Are you quite finished with me?” Javert questioned, tired and irritated as he did not understand this torment. But the ghost only locked eyes with him and the flame of his head only grew brighter. The Inspector found himself unable to look away until his eyes were filled with searing white. He closed them, the ghostly after-image of unnatural eyes burning red against his eyelids.

There was darkness and quietness when the image finally fades away. Chill in the air, too. Nothingness. Absolute emptiness devoid of any sensation and movement. Javert thought: If there is Hell, of which the Church loves to remind us, this has to be it.

Then! A rustling of paper and a dry cough of a man clearing his lungs from the left. Javert opened his eyes to stare at a hearth long gone cold, last remaining pieces of wood and coal remained there slightly burned. He recognized the place as the police station of Montreil-sur-Mer. He knew who he was going to see behind the table on the left.

And he was right. Behind the table was sitting no one else than he. A few years younger, yet already with hair grey as steel. He had never seen himself working before, hunched over a table with papers spread across it, hair coming out of its queue and falling loose into his face. Hand holding tightly on the pen, sometimes he had to breathe on his fingers to keep them warm. Lips moving around the words he was putting down without a voice, as if the report he was composing was a prayer.

Outside the bells tolled midnight. The Inspector behind the table did not even look up, but the one who was not there at all gazed out of the window. The town was covered in snow and the last late-goers were rushing to the church to the midnight mass.

“Ghost? Are you here? Ghost of the Christmas Past?” he asked into the room which could not hear him. “Take me away from this place. I cannot bear this any more. Take me away!”

“You cannot bear it?” The ghost's face appeared in the window and overlapped with his own reflection. Javert felt his cheeks warming and breath shortening. The glass showed him burning and that was how he felt – aflame.

It echoed itself: “ _You_ cannot bear it?”

“No, please. No, I can't –“

“How dare you? How _dare_ you? _How dare you?!_ ” The ghost's voice crescendoed into a shout and it's words lost all structure, until all that was left was a brain-piercing shriek and wail.

The fire blinded Javert, even when he closed his eyes, all that he could see was painful whiteness. He did not know how long he stood there, unmoving and unseeing, but it seemed to him that it was forever.

After a long while he realized that the bright fire faded and that he could no longer hear the Ghost of the Christmas Past. When he dared to open his eyes, which was not right away, he found himself once again on the bridge, standing on the cold stone railing. One step forward and the water would swallow him without a trace.

That was what he wanted, though, was it not? And still, when he moved his foot forward he found himself holding his breath. A hesitation. Did his conviction falter? No, no it did not. And yet... And yet.

The circumstances of his birth, of his whole existence had pushed solitude upon him his whole life, of that he was aware. Here and now in the dead of the night, in this strange moment between times when it was neither night nor dawn, in this place which was a bridge between places both most literally and metaphorically, only in this time and in this place and after the peculiral experience he had just gone through, Inspector Javert was able and even willing to admit that he embraced the prison of this solitude. He did not fight against it, he did not think about it. He accepted it as it was given, and not for a moment had he entertained any thought of breaking out of it.

He could not help but wonder: Were he to ever to reach out to people or let himself to be reached, would his life be different? Would he be here now? Most possibly not. There would be people to whom he'd owe the duty of companionship, people whom he would be unable to leave without any explanation.

For the first time in what felt like years, Javert found himself with a selfish thought: He wanted to be missed. Alas, there was no one who would miss him, no one that would mourn for him. It is no use to mull it over, however, the decisions had been made, set in stone

His thoughts were interrupted by a jingle and huff from behind him. Carefully Javert stepped down from the stone ledge of the bridge and turned around.

Without a doubt he was facing a ghost in the form of a young man who would upon adulthood grow into grandeur, and already in height it reached over Javert, who was by no mean a short man. Already it was sporting a beard and red cheeks and nose of those who drink too much for their health. It was wearing a green furry cloak with rich ermine lining, an article of clothing too large for it. Javert's quick eye noticed movement underneath it, but whatever it was, the cloak concealed it.

“I am nearly willing to consider the ridiculous possibility that I find myself in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Present,” the Inspector did not smile, “but it is July.”

The ghost's voice was deep and rich and surprisingly pleasant when it spoke: “Consider all you please, but what you find ridiculous or not is of no importance. For I indeed am Christmas Present. It is too early in the year for me to awake, but my siblings begged of me to pay you a visit as well. Wish you could see me in all my splendour, though. On the Eve I am a sight to behold. Walk with me.”

The ghost put one of its large hands on Javert's shoulder, if the Inspector did not want to follow him, he would have been dragged against his will. To walk along was to keep at least some pretence of dignity.

They walked in silence through the darkened streets of Paris when Javert to his own amazement found that it began to snow. He held out a glove-clad hand and one single snowflake fell on it. He examined its structure closely, it was perfectly hexagonal and intricate in its buid, and melted only once he breathed on it accidentally.

Wiping the drop of water into his coat, Javert noticed the house they had come to; it was the place where the family of the corpse-boy revolutionary lived. Javert did not want to go inside, but already the door had swung open in front of them and the Ghost of Christmas Present walked in.

There was brightness everywhere, the best silver brought out, all candles lit, people milling about the place.

“Marius, Marius!” a woman cried. Javert turned to see her and to his amazement he found Cosette, the girl from the woods and Jondrette's inn, now not a girl anymore, but a grown woman. She was very charming to look at, even though her tastes in men were somewhat lacking, because Marius was the dead boy Valjean and Javert had brought in. Apparently his condition had greatly improved since then.

It was entirely possible that the scene they were seeing happened before the revolution, but judged solely on the scars in Marius' hair and forehead, this was the Christmas Eve later of this year.

Javert looked around, he did not recognize anyone else present save for the man in the corner of the room who was attempting to sink into the wall. Jean Valjean. He was looking at the two young lovebirds as if each touch and each glance and each word they exchanged was a stab to his heart. Yet his distant smile persisted on his face.

The Inspector made his way to him, walking through people when he could not avoid them. He then positioned himself by his side and watched the room. The ghost disappeared among the people, but Javert was aware of its presence in the loud laughter, the smell of punch and roasted meat, the glistening of gold and silver, and in the light of the candle flame.

“You cannot hear me, can you?” Javert tried.

Valjean could not hear him, and when Javert put his hand on his elbow, it went through it as if he was merely as solid as water.

He asked the man, even though he was aware there will be no answer: “Does it hurt to let people go out of your life? To know that he will steal your daughter away? How can you keep looking?”

Javert could not help himself but watch Valjean's face. The face of a prisoner, of a mayor, of a convict-saint. Of an old man lost in life of solitude, knowing no way out of it. Even when he was not held by bars and chains, that man was still a prisoner, one of his own making.

The realization filled him with anger. He let the man go free, why would he condemn himself this way, then? Did he not want his freedom? Was this what Javert was going to cast himself into the abyss below Point-au-Change for?

_Selfish. Selfish, selfish, selfish._

Something grasped around his ankle, something cold and hard. He looked down to see a hand, small and angular. It could belong to a starved child. The elbow it was connected to could not be seen, however, as the forearm dressed in rugs disappeared behind a curtain of ermine. Javert looked up to see the room falling into nothingness, and to find that the Ghost of Christmas Present was standing by his side.

“How kind of you to join me.”

“I see my companions have found you,” the apparition acknowledged the hand. “I am afraid that I am not yet strong enough to keep any of them at bay.”

Javert did not try to wrestle his leg free. Another hand grasped at his knee. “If you are a metaphor, and you most likely are, what are your companions? I have noticed them before, hiding under your pomp and gild.” His lips curled in an ugly grin when he asked: “What is it the men try to hide within you?”

The ghost unclasped its grand cloak and let it fall to the ground. Javert expected to see it to be withered underneath, but no, it was a young man in good health. The two dishevelled child-like creatures crouching at his feet, however, were not.

“This, great Inspector, is Want,” the ghost pointed to the one which was holding Javert's ankle, “and this is Ignorance,” it introduced the other.

Ignorance's nails dug deeper into Javert's leg and it pulled itself to stand upright. It did not hold itself proudly, for it was dirty and hunched, its fair hair matted and the rags covering its body were falling apart in every place. It smiled at the inspector with crooked yet very sharp teeth, and whispered: “Mine.”

“Get off me,” Javert commands. “I do not belong to anyone. To the law, maybe, but you are not it.”

Both creatures laughed, Ignorance's putrid breath rolled over Javert's nose and made him very nauseous. “We might be not it,” Want licked its cracked lips, “but humans wrote the law in our name. And you upheld it greatly. You are ours.”

Javert's foot kicked practically on its own. There was a crack when it connected with Want's arm, and the Inspector found his other ankle to be free of the creature's grasp. He did not hesitate for even a moment, and tore Ignorance away from himself, pushing it as far as he could. However, it hooked its foot around his legs, and in turn send the Inspector rumbling to the ground.

He hit the cold cobblestone hard enough to lose his breath and sight for a moment. He was expecting the two creatures on his back, but there was nothing. When he stood up, he found himself, once again, on the bridge.

Standing on the stone parapet in front of him, right next to his had, was yet another figure. It was tall, but a long hooded wispy cloak of blackness concealed any other features. Javert had a fleeting thought that it should be holding a scythe.

“Listen, I've had a really hard day,” he sighed, “and the night also hasn't turned out to be the most pleasant. Can we please get to the point and be through this?” When no answer came, he resigned. “Oh well, what am I talking to now? There was Christmas Past, Christmas Present, does that make you Christmas Future?”

The ghost only tiled its head to side. Javert recognized that while his answer was not wrong, it was not correct either. “Hm, that does not have the right ring to it. You would choose yourself a more dramatic name by the look of it. Are you,” he licked his lips and hesitated for a second, “are you the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come.”

There was a single nod, slow and definite.

“Very well then, take me where you must or wherever you want to. But before we go, tell me,” the Inspector turned away from the ghost, “are there going to be more of you tonight? Do you not think that you have tormented me enough?”

It only drew its hand forward, the folds of the black garment revealing a thin hand with long, pale pointy fingers. Whether that was skin and nails or clean bone, Javert could not tell. Neither he cared for it, as the ground and scenery around them disappeared in a whirlwind. As the cobblestone slipped away from underneath his feet, he leapt forwards to the ghost in an attempt to remain on the solid ground.

The attempt was in vain, as even there the ground disappeared. Yet the dark blackness surrounding them was as solid as any floor Javert had ever set his feet upon, perhaps even more so, and finding it to be so, the man drew himself back unto upright position.

“Where are we?” he asked the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come which against the darkness seemed to grow bigger in size and richer and deeper in colour – in the nothingness it was the void itself. It spread its arms like wings of the night and then...

Then there was light coming from everywhere, so bright in comparison to the absolute blackness, that for a brief moment Javert found himself blinded.

They stood in the entrance hall of the police station, drowned in weak autumn daylight. Outside he could hear rain strong enough for the common folk to conclude that all the saints and beatified had decided to pour one out for a good man.

The policemen spoke in hushed voices, but when Javert strained his ears, he could hear them well enough.

“...found him by the... bridge, already decayed... horrible death, this drowning... completely mad... always said so...”

“...completely disappeared... probably to America... slaver, I can't imagine what his daughter... happened to the other one?”

“It is alright... pay you, let them go... keep quiet... you need the coin more than they... rich can afford a little villainy... court will never find them guilty, so why to bother...”

“...skim a little off the top... accounting is ungrateful job anyway...”

Javert turned on his heel sharply to find his colleagues, at this point his old colleagues, he assumed, lading by a group of new recruits. He could not believe what they were telling to the young men. They taught them dishonesty, direct theft even! His anger and horror only grew when he heard more.

It was his duty to put a stop to this, like he did many times before. He halted in the hallway, right in front of the little group coming his way. But as he opened his mouth to give them a scolding talk, they all walked through him. After all, he was not there and he could not stop them.

The scene was changed the same way the ghost had taken Javert here, now it took him away.

They appeared in a bedroom, cold and empty. No, not empty, only without any motion. Kneeling in front of the bed, forehead rested against the long-time-untouched covers, was a woman in mourning dress. Javert recognized her by the hair, for she was Cosette.

The woman was holding two silver candlesticks, and when Javert bent over, he noticed she was crying. Apparently she had been crying a long time, as her eyes were red and her cheeks stained with salt, her whole body collapsed and exhausted, not having even enough power left to shake and sob.

Javert stood up and looked out of the window to change the depressing scene. He found morning Paris, covered in snow and gild of celebrations. He had the fleeting feeling he saw the Ghost of Christmas Present in one of the windows, but it could not be him, as this was the Christmas which was yet to come. But in the future this would be the present Christmas, so of course the ghost could appear here, was it not so?

But more than that, Javert was amazed to find that he was overlooking the streets from Valjean's house. Except nowhere in the room or the whole building he could feel his presence. And Cosette, the girl he so cared for and who so much cared for him, was kneeling in front of an empty bed and cried.

The Ghost if Christmas Yet To Come approached the Inspector from behind. The man did not turn to it, only lowered his gaze to the floor as he spoke: “If your next intended stop is to the graveyard so that I could see his grave, you can spare yourself the work. I have seen many graves in my life.”

Again the ghost spread its hands and the world dissolved into blackness. But this time no new place appeared. Instead Javert felt warmth as the apparition wrapped him in his arms and the countless folds of its large cloak of shadows. Now he was certain that the thin figure was indeed skeletal. Yet its embrace was soothing. Calming. Numbing.

“Don't you think that I do not understand,” Javert whispered, but he heard his voice coming from very far, far away. “You and your siblings. Christmas Past is the memory in which we light the candle. It is fleeting like a child, and its light is bright enough to hurt. Christmas Present is now, held back by the monstrosities of man's own making which we hen try to conceal beneath grandeur. Every moment the present dies and every moment it is born anew, different but still same.”

The skeletal hands tightened around his chest. The embrace was not mean-spirited or threatening. To Javert it felt motherly and protective, a feeling he hadn't known in a long time. It was also inescapable.

“And you... you are the future. In the future everyone dies, that is the only thing that is so certain about you. Besides deaths, nothing else you can be is certain and written in stone. Is this why you appear like death itself?”

There was, of course, no answer. But Javert was not expecting one. He continued: “My mother was a fortune-teller. I am not sure if you can know it, because it was a long time ago, so far away from your domain. She had taught me how to read cards. In cards, Death, the thirteenth of the Great Arcana, is not a bad card to draw. No, it is the card number fifteen you do not wish to see.”

The ghost had now covered his face, and Javert could not move an inch. Nor he wanted to. For the first time in his life, he felt a freedom to his actions. A freedom to his thoughts, to his speech. He closed his eyes and said: “And you are death, ghost. I am not afraid. Take me with you, then. Take me to the future.”

Something terribly cold touched his forehead, so cold that it hurt him like a knife. It was pressed there for the longest of times and he could not move away from it. Only when the feeling passed had Javert realized that it was a kiss.

He opened his eyes, very, very slowly. Underneath his hands was the stone ledge of the bridge once again, and his gaze was locked on the beginning sunrise above the river.

Javert stood there until the sun, the herald of the tomorrow, did not appear above the water in its entirety. Then he put on his hat and walked away, retracing his footsteps, until he stood in front of Valjean's door on which he knocked.

A woman with the tired face of someone who hadn't slept enough, opened to him. She was very beautiful, In Javert's opinion, especially now when she was not crying.

“Good morning, young lady. Is you father home? It would appear I need to talk to him.


End file.
